I am a Twitter addict and the newly released Tweetbot for the iPad is my favorite client. The clean interface uses swipe gestures to facilitate working with tweets and following a lot of timeline updates. I love this app.

Zite scours the web and builds a lovely news magazine consisting of the topics that interest me. It is customizable to present most any topic, and learns over time what news the user most wants to see. I run Zite several times a day to keep up with news, without fail.

A top list of iPad apps would not be complete without Evernote. This note-taking app combines an excellent text editor with information capturing tools that together make Evernote my top research and writing tool. It syncs my work with the Evernote cloud, and with clients available for all mobile and desktop platforms my work is accessible on any phone, tablet or computer that I use.

Flipboard takes the news magazine metaphor and adds social networking to the mix to make a useful app. It is a good way to follow online news sources, and an outstanding method to track my Twitter and Facebook friends.

Idea Bucket is an attractive app that is designed to help the user make decisions based on a set of defined criteria. The criteria can be tailored to fit the particular objective, with each one weighted individually to indicate the importance relative to the other factors. Idea Bucket uses all the information at hand to indicate the best option of all those available, and clearly shows why it chose what it did.

Sometimes only a Windows PC will do, and OnLive Desktop presents a remote desktop on the iPad screen for access to Mcrosoft Office apps. The desktop interface works well by touch and since these are the full Office apps there are no compromises. It is a fast, easy way to work with Office documents on the iPad.

Storyist is a serious tool for writers of short stories, screenplays and other fiction. It is a self-contained app with tools for developing characters, story timelines, and index cards for notes. These are combined with a text editor to make it easy to write anywhere on the iPad, and even produce a properly formatted manuscript at the end. It is compatible with Storyist on the Mac, and features easy synchronization with Dropbox.

I use Google Docs for working with many types of documents, and TouchDocs is a great way to interface with my stuff in the cloud. It combines an attractive interface with a solid editor that works with all file types supported by Google Docs. It enables working with documents anywhere and keeping them synced with Google Docs in the cloud.

I'm a sucker for a good weather app and Weather Live gives a simple one-screen forecast. It gives all the expected information in the forecast, complete with wind speed/direction, barometric pressure, visibility, precipitation, and humidity. It presents everything with an attractive HD animated display sure to please.

I love to listen to music on the iPad, and TuneIn Radio is my favorite way to do that. The app streams radio in real-time from stations all over the world, and has good search capability to find just the right station to match your mood. Stations can be saved to the favorite presets to make returning to them as easy as tapping the screen. TuneIn also shows the scheduled programming for each station, with reminders for shows you don't want to miss. The sleep timer and alarm let you fall asleep and wake up to any station you wish. You can record the streaming audio within the app. TuneIn Radio Pro works in the background, so you can listen to the radio while doing other things.

Panes brings multi-tasking and widgets to the iPad. The app displays up to three columns (panes), each containing one or two widgets. The widgets are rich and varied, from a full Twitter client to a web browser. Using Panes you can follow Twitter and Facebook side-by-side with yet another widget alongside them both. The widgets include an RSS reader, Google Reader, calculator, and calendar app just to name a few. The Panes can be closed as desired with a simple swipe, allowing any one or two apps to take the full screen.

Those familiar with the app Glimpse for the HP TouchPad will recognize Panes, as it is a direct port to the iPad, bringing widgets and multiple windows to iOS.

Panes is in beta and not yet available, but should be in the App Store soon. It is a very useful app and already one of the apps I use the most on my iPad.

Flipboard takes the news magazine metaphor and adds social networking to the mix to make a useful app. It is a good way to follow online news sources, and an outstanding method to track my Twitter and Facebook friends.

James Kendrick has been using mobile devices since they weighed 30 pounds, and has been sharing his insights on mobile technology for almost that long. Prior to joining ZDNet, James was the Founding Editor of jkOnTheRun, a CNET Top 100 Tech Blog that was acquired by GigaOM in 2008 and is now part of that prestigious tech network. James' w...
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